Part of the Process

It has been a bit of a voyage into the unexpected in looking at SEO this month. For my side project Bashfully , which is to create an online profile for people early in their careers that has three guiding principles. That it should be: Discoverable - people need to be able to find the person based on their skills, experience, and aspirations. Personalised - the skills and experience need to have the ability to be tailored for specific job applications. Guiding - given the above, give enough structure that allows the profile builder to tell their story in the best way possible. Also a longer term goal here is to provide feedback based on other profiles that match their aspirations. The features that we develop tend to rotate around each of these goals to keep the product balanced. We hadn't done much in the discoverable area, apart from setting meta data required for creating the cards used in sharing to Facebook or Twitter. Since this came up in our user research we ...

Photo by  Andres Urena  on  Unsplash This week I'm going to reflect on a year and bit of using two voice assistants - Alexa and Siri. Although much the same would apply to Google Home. I must start by saying I love Alexa and the echo dot. She does just enough and is unobtrusive enough in my life that I'm not a slave to her ... in the same way as a smartphone. Last month I wrote about one aspect that "we" have not looked into enough - privacy.  “I think it will make for a perfect alarm clock”  Trusted Reviews - Amazon Echo Spot Here it looks like part of the problem with technology is the uncritical approach of what could go wrong, in building and selling. There is no mention of privacy concerns apart from throw away comment about a "mute" feature. As well as the obvious issue of an internet connect camera in our bedrooms. I have been thinking about other issues related to a mindset used to personal in more common use areas. So I have done some di...

I was going to write about SEO and Bashfully , but is usual on software projects other things cropped up. In tandem with my day job I have mainly been thinking about maintaining delivery momentum.One of the downsides of small projects teams is the lack of capacity and time. However, the upside is focus and alignment. We manage this by: Keeping a Small backlog , we're open to opportunity but don't fill a backlog for the sake of it. Each completed feature is usually an avenue to learn and build. Referring to the vision and remembering YAGNI , there have been times that we have rejected ideas as they aren't core to what we are trying to achieve. And others that just aren't right yet (which we immediately discard, no clogging up the backlog!) Talking before starting dev, really simple but not relying on story formats or mock-ups. We talk through what we are trying to achieve and what success looks like. That's the good things that I have learned in this pha...

My week has been book-ended by Meetups! To finish off was the  ProductTank Brighton session looking at what developers need from product people and how changes impact them. Dorothy Wingrove kicked off the evening with a lightning talk on ' How to Build a World-Class Rock Paper Scissors Bot '. Dorothy went through the concepts needed to build a bot to play the well known game. As she showed the very simple code needed to execute each strategy - each on one slide - and going to meta-strategies she showed how very complex and adaptive behaviour can be built. This was the best illustration of the impact of "just one small change" I have seen. With each change having a knock on effect needing a further change. I'd recommend anyone responsible for managing the software development process who doesn't have a technical background to see this talk if you get the chance! (thanks to Craig for booking her in) Next was the "main event" of the evening a pan...

Last night I attended the first WordUp Brighton event of 2018 . Tammie Lister talked about the new WordPress editor, Gutenberg, and Dave Potter gave a talk on security. This was outside of my usual bubble as I'm making more of an effort in 2018 to explore the local "tech scene" outside of day-to-day concerns. Dave started off with a great look at "security". This wasn't the talk I was expecting from the title but brilliant. I had initially thought it would be about things like hacking, but it was more to do with the security of business processes. So important things like back-up and retention strategies, which introduced the hot topic of GDPR! How hosting impacts those. Also other things to look out for in hosting that can impact your business continuity, like what do hosts do when they see network spikes ... will they just take down your instance or a whole server? Tammie then did an intro to a new WordPress editor from Project Gutenburg. This look...

This week has been about kicking off projects at work and a major release for my side project. Because of this my reading has probably gravitated towards thoughts of design, focus and leadership around both.  Voice-Enabled Design is different enough to "point and click" that I think it will lead to some change of the profile of Product People. Interesting theory here that Drama Teachers will be the ideal people to lead the charge here.  Drama teachers may be one specialism IT could do more of. Critical thinkers is another. For example  “I think it will make for a perfect alarm clock”  Trusted Reviews - Amazon Echo Spot Here it looks like part of the problem with technology is the largely uncritical approach of what could go wrong, in building and selling, no mention of privacy concerns apart from throw away comment about a "mute" feature. Maybe they fell foul of the issue in this great quote from  Davide Vitiello in his  Focus vs Product Team St...

Last night I had a fun time in that there London town, for a meetup organised by Cennydd Bowles. I had become aware of the event after reading his post  A techie’s rough guide to GDPR . This was also a fairly rare trip to the Silicon Roundabout for me, and I was struck by how much it has changed recently. It was a low key, informal event with no agenda. Just interested (and interesting!) people talking about ethics and technology. Among the people I talked to were Anne who is organising an Ethical track at QCon, Rachel who had a brilliant ice break around topics that we thought would help keep technology ethical. Mark's answer that the fast scaling was an issue was more convincing than mine that "transparency" would be the answer. To paraphrase, he said that companies like Uber, AirBnB, and Facebook had probably scaled much quicker than their corporate governance and leadership could scale. The ecosystems that develop around these companies also further diluted the eth...